| CHAPTER 15 “Give her some more time.” He turned his head away from watching Zar to look at Audrey. The look on his face must’ve reflected his feelings because she was smiling slightly, as if to give him hope. But after three weeks, hope was pretty much gone. The whole family had come running out of Genesco’s General Store at the sound of the ship blowing up. The fear on their faces quickly turning to relief when they saw him striding towards them. Then their gazes had turned to Zar in puzzlement. It hadn’t been surprising that they didn’t recognize her in her filthy and semi-catatonic state. Being out in the open with a large, noisy fire not far from their location made Richard nervous. He’d been about to move the lot of them towards their transport when Audrey had recognized Zar and whispered her name much as he had earlier. Imam’s mouth had almost comically fallen open as he too beheld a supposedly dead woman. When the truth had finally sunk in, he’d started raising his arms and praising Allah in loud shouts. Zar had continued to stare ahead at the nothing right over Audrey’s shoulder. Lost in her own little world. Richard hadn’t given the rapidly deteriorating situation a chance to get even more out of control. He hustled the whole lot of them to the transport and took off as soon as possible. Strapping the unresisting Zar into the front seat next to him, he promised Audrey and Imam he’d fill them in once they arrived safely at the farmstead. That hadn’t stopped Audrey from bombarding Zar with questions and from behind hugs. He understood only too well the astonished young woman’s need to touch Zar. But as the questions continued and no responses came, Audrey had started to realize that something was very wrong with Zar. He’d been grateful when Imam, obviously sensing Richard’s strained silence, asked Audrey to hold the inquisition until they got home. Compassion fought a hard battle with curiosity, but it finally won. It had been one of the longest rides home Richard could recall. Plenty of time to remember. He hadn’t been particularly thrilled at winning the farm in that fateful card game. But as he slept that night, he’d had a dream of living on the farm. The deed included a hologram program showing what the buildings and the land around it looked like. A house, a barn, a mini-fuel refinery and a couple of storage sheds dotted land surrounded by a forest on three sides. The farmable land was only a few hundred acres, enough to subsist on, but not enough to get rich off of. Which was why the loser had been willing to give it up even though it had been in his family for fifty years. The colony of Whitson’s Crossing, on the planet of New Concord, was just too far off the beaten trading path to ever truly be successful. Nevertheless, the few people, mostly descendents of the original colonists that settled there, eked out a living in relative peace from the low-life’s of the galaxy and the ASF. Nothing ever exciting happened there anyway. The dream had left him with a vague ache in the vicinity of his heart. Peace and boredom sounded wonderful to him at that moment. Something completely different from the life he’d led so far. He could never replace the life he’d had with Zar, but maybe another kind of home would do. No sooner had the thought occurred when an image of Audrey’s face had popped into his head. He hadn’t really questioned himself on why it was so important to get the family together again. A part of him was doing it because he knew Zar would’ve wanted it. The other part just missed them. He missed Audrey’s smart aleck remarks and come backs. Imam’s gentle yet stubborn belief in the goodness of God. Hill’s small, warm body as it nestled against his as he slept. Oh...he knew they would be older and changed by now. Too much time, over a year, had passed for that not to be the case. But they, along with the stasis tube that held his child, were the only things that linked him to Zar. He didn’t want the link broken. So he contacted Imam. With the galaxy still under the assumption that Richard B. Riddick was dead, getting a message to Imam and Audrey was easy. As long as it was done discreetly and under a false name. Rick Miller was unusable. So Robert Farmer (his little idea of a joke) was born. He was relieved at finding an ecstatically happy Audrey still with Imam, taking care of Hill while finishing her much delayed formal education. They had assumed Zar was still with him. He hadn’t the patience to go into the long story via vid screen. He knew that once they arrived, the truth would be out soon enough. Both cleric and teen-ager had been more than happy to come to New Concord to start life over. New Mecca was nice, but they had missed Zar and Richard also. For Audrey, her memories of Polaris Station were some of the happiest of her young life. And after losing the boys entrusted to his care on Taurus 2, Imam wasn’t about to lose another child. Where Audrey and Hill went, he went. Period. And besides, he missed his favorite hobby...farming. On New Mecca he found employment as a store manager, too frightened of notice to put his agri-engineering degree to use. It more than paid for the care of the children, but it did little to satisfy the need to feel good, rich dirt on his hands. While the three of them made plans to make the year long journey to rendezvous with him on New Concord, Richard had plans of his own to make. He needed a surrogate to be impregnated with his and Zar’s child. He found a desperate young widow. She and her husband had been on their way to a mining planet when they stopped to get supplies on the Remir 8 outpost. The husband had been bitten by the gambling bug. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at it. He’d lost everything and then some within a matter of days. Too cowardly to face his wife, he’d killed himself. Leaving her to make her way as best as she could. She found a sympathetic barkeep willing to give her a job as a waitress. But her scum of a husband had left a lot of unpaid, very scary men. The time when she would have to turn to prostitution was approaching quickly. Her name was Melinda Previschak. Richard had seen her on one of his many trips to the bar. She was passably pretty, but even more important, she was clean. No drugs, no venereal disease or such. She was just a good woman caught in a bad situation not of her making. She seemed desperate enough to go for the whole surrogate situation. He was right. She jumped at the opportunity to stave off prostitution as long as possible. In return for paying off her dead husband’s debts and paying for her upkeep, she would carry and give birth to the child. After the birth, whether successful or not, he would pay her a lump sum of credits as a bonus. He made sure she understood where she stood. He wasn’t in the market for a wife or girlfriend. Just a working female body to give birth to his child. They found a quack doctor to perform the simple procedure to implant the embryo. For the next nine months Richard made sure she had the best of everything possible. They were in bum fuck egypt, but money still bought a lot. She moved in with him on the Marie’s Ruin. It let him keep an eye on her safety and health. They never grew anywhere near being close. Her husbands betrayal embedding a distrust of men permanently in her psyche. For Richard, something burned deep every time he let himself realize that a woman who was not Zar was thick with her child. It was best for both to keep their distance. When Zarabeth was born, he was there. She came out kicking and screaming fiercely. A healthy, pink, squalling beauty that demanded his attention. She was the most divine creature ever to draw breath. He knew at that moment that he had never loved anything or anyone more. Even his amazing love for her mother seemed mild compared to the feeling filling him up from the heart out. He named her Zarabeth in honor of her mother and her half-sister. In her, they both came back to life. He’d known Elizabeth only in her mother’s memories. Very sad memories for the most part. Her tragic and brutal death forever coloring Zar’s recollections. But her name also served as a reminder to him to never let down his guard against Fate and her whimsical twists. Zar had lost Elizabeth and he had lost Zar to Fate’s sick sense of humor, he wasn’t losing Zarabeth. She was his. Forever. Six weeks later she’d been weaned from Melinda (he never once thought of her as being Zarabeth’s mother) and they were on their way to New Concord. Melinda had made vague noises about trying to keep her. But it had only taken one look into Richard’s cold, silver eyes, along with his quietly spoken promise to kill her, to shut her up. He’d never told her the reason he hired her for surrogate duty. And though he had treated her well in a detached sort of way, she had never really found the courage to ask. There was something too cold and hard about him to risk the inquiry. Caring for Zarabeth had been no problem. He’d been saddled enough times with baby-sitting the younger foster home kids as a youth to know the basics. A time when life hadn’t quite beat him down and started him on the road to hell. He made sure his arrival and subsequent visits to the colony were low key. The people were quiet farming folk. They weren’t the type to go looking for adventure in their own backyards, but rather left the colony altogether if life became too boring. The farmstead had been in decent shape and soon he and Zarabeth were living a quiet life. He had plenty of credits to keep them in comfort. In fact, he probably wouldn’t have to farm the land at all if he didn’t want to. But he did for some reason. What that reason was, and its emotional complications, he refused to dwell on. He and the baby had been on the farm a few weeks when the rest of the family arrived. Audrey had hugged him so hard he thought she might have cracked a rib. Imam, once Audrey had managed to release her stranglehold, had embraced him also and praised Allah for his benevolence. Hill had been the biggest shock. Richard’s memories had been of a little shit that barely made himself felt as he slept on the much bigger mans chest. Now he was a rambunctious toddler on a constant tear. Life with Imam and Audrey had obviously suited him. Zar had been right to send them to him. The news of Zar’s torture and death hit both of them hard. But Audrey had been especially effected. Richard knew by her shaking and tears that she had built of a fantasy life for Zar and himself. The fact that she had done so hadn’t particularly surprised him. Some people, like himself, became mean and hard when life rained it’s crap down. Others, like Imam, turned to religion to give them the strength to get through. But many were like Audrey. Self-delusion helped them cope. And hey...who was he to judge one method above another? Whatever kept you together, body and soul. Zarabeth had been as much a comfort to Audrey as she was to her father. Richard hadn’t wanted Audrey to feel tied down or obligated to take care of both Hill and Zarabeth. She grown into her looks and had become a beautiful, smart young woman with a lot of potential. The children were his responsibilities now. If Audrey wanted to go live her life, he’d make sure she would have the money and freedom to do so. But the seventeen year old had seemed to need the kids as much as they needed her. Something relaxed in him when knew that Audrey would be contributing her female softness to his male toughness in Zarabeth’s upbringing. He’d been worried that with just him doing the raising, the little girl would end up as fucked as he’d been. He wanted her to be like her mother, beautiful in spirit with a loving touch but tough when the going got ugly. With Audrey along for the ride, there was a much better chance of that happening. Life had settled down quickly. Richard and Imam had taken up the day to day running of the farm with Imam making most of the trips to Whitson’s Crossing. Audrey took care of the children while finishing out her final years of education via computer classes. The children flourished and so did the farm. It reminded him of the old time communes that had been tried on Earth in latter half of the twenty-first century. The ones where all the adults were responsible for raising a child, not just the parents. If it ever became boring, all the adults had do to was remind themselves that exciting often equaled terrifying. The perfect example being their respective times incarcerated and on the run. And of their shared agonizing experience on Taurus 2. Nope...if they had their choice between exciting and boring, boring would win hands down every time. But now Zar was back and nothing would be the same. There was not going to be the fairy-tale happy ending that both Imam and Audrey seemed to expect. For the most part, Zar was still the unresponsive person he’d found on that ship. Though she had thawed somewhat after getting a couple of days of cleanliness, food and sleep. After Flowers assertion that she had a tendency to wander, Richard had stayed up a couple of nights to watch over her. But she had stayed put. Some instinct to escape Flowers mistreatment must’ve been why she wandered away previously. She still wouldn’t talk or meet anyone’s eyes but would rather cast furtive, wary glances when she thought no one was watching. But Richard saw. He saw the fear, the uncertainty...and the inability to express them. But on the bright side, she didn’t act like a zombie anymore. She helped out with the house work and some minor chores around the farm. She ignored the children altogether. A telling response in it’s very resoluteness. They affected her on some level. Some level she wasn’t willing to deal with. Richard was betting it was the old Zar’s love of children trying to make itself known. Hill didn’t seem to care too much one way or the other. Audrey was really the only mother he knew. But Zarabeth was absolutely fascinated by the stranger among them. She’d stand quietly (that in itself was remarkable) and watch while Zar did the dishes or some other household chore. She wasn’t allowed in the equipment strewn barn, so when Zar was in there she’d sit on the porch and wait patiently for the object of her affection to come out. Richard had wondered occasionally what their daughter had inherited from her unique parents. From the genetic manipulation at the very heart of the experiment that WAS her. Watching her watch Zar, he thought maybe the child had inherited some sixth sense that let her know that Zar was her mother. Stranger things had happened. He had tried to talk to Zar. Reassure her that she was safe now. She’d just sat there looking at the floor. He’d even hugged her. But it had been like embracing a statue. She didn’t try to stop him, but she didn’t exactly put out the welcome mat either. She had yet to speak one word. Now she was sitting out in the flower and herb garden Audrey had planted not long after arriving on New Concord. It seemed to be her favorite place. Once in awhile she even closed her eyes and tilted her face up to the sun. But she never smiled, so he was just guessing that it was a preferred spot. The whole situation was frustrating the ever-living fuck out of him. What in the hell was he supposed to do for her?! He knew it wasn’t her fault she was like this. It was the trauma and after effects of the Profearaben. But for the ever-fucking-love-of-God...what was he supposed to do?! He knew what he wanted wasn’t ever going to happen. That one day, any day, she would wake up and be the woman he loved. As it was right now, there wasn’t even anything about her that he could remotely identify as being the quintessential Zar. He wanted to touch her. Just touch her. Not necessarily in a sexual way, although being with her again would’ve been heaven. He just wanted to sleep with her in his arms. Wake up to her smell...her smile. Her. But touching her now seemed somehow dirty. As if he was molesting a coma patient or something. In his former life...well...he wasn’t sure if that would’ve stopped him. But he wanted more than physical release with her. He wanted her eyes alive with the wanting of him, when he buried himself in her. She obviously didn’t remember anything of her former life. All the memories she had were of Flowers. Richard was sure those weren’t fond memories. The whole ugly situation left him in one great big sullen and frustrated knot. Fuck. Staring at Audrey’s hopeful face, he couldn’t bring himself to even try and play Mr. Optimism. “I don’t think so, kid.” Even though she was now a grown woman, he still called her that. She never seemed to mind. “She is what she is. Which is a great big gaping whole of nothing. We might have to start accepting that. Treat her like brand new person. We’re just confusing her now with all this TLC bullshit. She’s alive and...” A screamed ripped the air. Whipping their heads back towards where Zar was sitting. She was gone. The scream sounded again. A scream of pain. Richard took off running towards the forest next to the garden. Audrey started out right behind him, but soon was outdistanced. She knew it was more than just the Profearaben making him fast. It was desperation. The scream hadn’t come from Zar. It had was the scream of a child in pain...a female child. Zarabeth. |
|